CRM Solutions For The Retail And Wholesale Trade

Forrester reviewed 24 CRM suite solutions to understand their strengths and weaknesses in supporting 10 key cross-functional processes in the retail and wholesale trade: 1) trade promotion; 2) loyalty marketing; 3) pricing optimization; 4) integrated sales and marketing; 5) order-to-cash; 6) customer segmentation and targeting for retail; 7) analytics for retail; 8) retail execution; 9) sales solutions for retail; and 10) marketing solutions for retail. We found that Oracle E-Business Suite CRM, Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM, Oracle Siebel CRM, and SAP CRM are strong for nearly all business processes specific to the retail and wholesale trade. Microsoft Dynamics CRM and salesforce.com support retail-specific capabilities through partner solution integrations. NetSuite, RightNow CX, and Sword Ciboodle support selected processes across both retail and wholesale. In addition to doing deep due diligence on the suitability of CRM solutions to meet unique retail industry requirements, business process professionals must take into account the increased popularity of the software-as-a service (SaaS) deployment approach, the rise of business process management (BPM) solutions, and the rapid adoption of mobile technologies.